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as a fully accomplished man of science, although, undoubtedly, many 

 persons have been ranked as such upon very inferior claims. It was 

 part of his character. Like Dr Wollaston, he had the most precise 

 and methodical line of demarcation between what he wished to be 

 considered competent to decide, and what he declined offering any 

 opinion upon. It was a caution which might be well deemed ex- 

 cessive, as his real acquii-ements were undoubtedly greater than even 

 his intimate friends were fully aware of. His own opinions also 

 were, for the same reason, often sheltered under the impersonal form. 

 In almost no instance that I recollect of did he suffer his name to 

 be put as a responsible member of a Committee of the Council to 

 decide on the merits of purely scientific communications. Nor 

 could this have arisen from any unwillingness to such occupation or 

 responsibility ; for in another Society, of whose general business he 

 considered himself a competent judge, no one was more active in such 

 capacities. His backwardness in this particular can only, there- 

 fore, be ascribed to a very strict appreciation of his own acquired 

 knowledge. His youth and middle life were spent, as we have seen, 

 in circumstances little favourable to the acquirements of abstract 

 science, or of literary dexterity. ^Mien leisure permitted, he did 

 not become a regular student, which could hardly be expected at his 

 time of life ; and he seldom made a profound or consecutive study of 

 any of the scientific topics which continually presented themselves to 

 his acute remark during his multifarious occupations. Thus, when 

 he associated with scientific men, after so many years spent remote 

 from European society, he was generous enough rather to throw 

 useful hints in the way of others, and to aid their prosecution, than 

 to hoard the many happy ideas which he struck out, or present 

 views essentially philosophical in a crude or merely practical form. 

 I conjecture, too, that, clearly as he at all times expressed himself, 

 whether in conversation or in writing, he had a sort of dislike to formal 

 literary compositions, which contrasted with his father''s extraordi- 

 nary fluency in this respect, and which hindered him from attempt- 

 ing them. This may be inferred from the paucity of his acknow- 

 ledged compositions during so active a life, which consist only, so far 

 as I know, of the paper on Whitelaw's Timekeeper already mentioned, 

 an article on Turning, in the Edinburgh Encyclopsedia ; a descrip- 

 tion both in English and French (at least the latter), of two Plates 

 published by Mr John Milne, of a large Pumping Steam-Engine ; 

 an account of the failure of a Suspension Bridge at Paris, and 

 another paper in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and two or three 



